Monday, April 28, 2014

What is it that I do, again? Okay, now ... how do I say that, exactly...?

Reading Watkins this week came at a particularly reflective
time for me. I apologize for being so transparent in this post, but I would
love your feedback – and sense we’re skipping the Watkins reading, I would
like to focus on it. For another class that I am taking right now, I need to
write a teaching statement. The teaching statement, or philosophy, as I’m sure
that many of you know, has all the ambiguities of the personal statement plus
the added stress of trying to articulate exactly what is you “do” in the
classroom, what you want from your students, what you do to aid in their learning,
ect. This is particularly challenging for me sense I’ve never actually taught a
class before. But for the sake of this particular
assignment I’ve been ruminating on something that is future tense. In my thinking, I continue to return to Watkins and the class problems of both teaching and higher ed and being a student in higher ed, and how to simultaneously manage the demands placed on teachers while also dealing with the demands and expectations that rise up through the students.

I found myself lazily
slipping back in to the old standbys of, “reading writing
and literacy” or “English is a tool for other/any/all disciplines,”ect. I wrote
these words because part of me thought that that
was what I’m supposed to say. I’m supposed to boast of how my future class,
my discipline can prepare anyone for anything! As if, some how, reading A Brave New World will prepare someone
to work on an oil rig or some other job that any one of my future students will
find themselves in. And part of my answer to this is “Yes!” it will prepare
them, because literature and the studying the humanities makes a person human; it’s not about being cultured at the end of the day, it’s about the infinite variety
of experience that literary studies provides in aiding our understanding of ourselves
and of one another.

However, I know that this humanist, idealistic, bleeding
heart response isn’t . . . enough . . . or isn’t all that we can say or do for our students and for our discipline. Furthermore,
I don’t want to trap myself into some kind of moralist argument about how
literacy makes someone a “better person” or Fisher’s "surrogateparenting". This discussion is slippery and endless while the the urgency to
nail down the infinite variety of work accomplished by departments of English is imminent. “Higher
ed” is becoming more and more corporate, more and more a “knowledge factory”
designed for profit. “Middle management” grows to oversee and regulate this
system while part time writing teachers work hard for little pay and are ultimately charged with mitigating the
greater class distinctions in society. The truly terrible thing about this is
if H&N are correct, then the writing teachers are the ones we need most-
they may not be recruited (as Chandler pointed out) like those of STEM, but
they should be.

Again, I know this is a rehashing of an old problem to which
there is probably not a clear answer. I would love to hear some of your responses
to these questions and problems. Some solutions may be with Marx, but when the problems of higher ed develop from a larger global culture of Capitalism, it is hard to feel like one very small, somewhat helpless, piece of the puzzle. The options for action seem to fall along the lines of Clover's "Cars are going to burn" or McClosky's "Optimism." Szmen's careful, mindful analysis of the oil industry (and thoughtful writings) may pave a more middle road not entirely unlike H&N.